Wednesday, April 1, 2015

The codes of the Polish Intelligence network in occupied France 1943-44

In WWII
Poland fought on the side of the Allies and suffered for it since it was the
first country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the period 1940-45 the Polish
Government in Exile and its military forces contributed to the Allied cause by
taking part in multiple campaigns of war. Polish pilots fought for the RAF
during the Battle of Britain, Polish troops fought in N.Africa, Italy and
Western Europe and the Polish intelligence service operated in occupied Europe
and even had agents inside the German High Command.

Although it
is not widely known the Polish intelligence service had spy networks operating
throughout Europe and the Middle East. The Poles established their own spy
networks and also cooperated with foreign agencies such as Britain’s Secret
Intelligence Service and Special Operations Executive, the American Office
of Strategic Services and even the Japanese
intelligence service. During the war the Poles supplied roughly 80.000
reports to the British intelligence services (1), including information on the
German V-weapons (V-1 cruise
missile and V-2 rocket) and reports from the German High Command (though
the agent ‘Knopf’) (2).

In occupied
France the intelligence department of the Polish Army’s General Staff organized
several resistance/intelligence groups tasked not only with obtaining
information on the German units but alsowith evacuating Polish men so they could serve in the Armed Forces.
These networks obviously attracted the attention of the German security
services and in 1941 the large INTERALLIE network, controlled by Roman Czerniawski, was
dismantled.

Another large
network was controlled by Zdzislaw Piatkiewicz aka ‘Lubicz'. The book ‘Secret History of MI6: 1909-1949’, p529 says
about this group: ‘Some of the Polish networks were very productive. One
based in the south of France run by ‘Lubicz' (Zdzislaw Piatkiewicz) had 159
agents, helpers and couriers, who in August and September 1943 provided 481
reports, of which P.5 circulated 346. Dunderdale's other organizations were
rather smaller’.

From German and British reports it seems that the radio communications
of the Polish spy groups in France (including the ‘Lubicz' net) were
compromised in the period 1943-44. Wilhelm Flicke who worked in the intercept
department of OKW/Chi (decryption department of the High Command of the Armed
Forces) says in ‘War Secrets in the Ether’ (3):

The Polish
intelligence service in France had the following tasks:

1.
Spotting concentrations of the Germany army, air force and navy.

2.
Transport by land and sea and naval movements.

3.
Ammunition dumps; coastal fortifications, especially on the French coast after
the occupation of Northern France.

4.
Selection of targets for air attack.

5.
Ascertaining and reporting everything which demanded immediate action by the
military command.

6. Details
regarding the French armament industry working for Germany, with reports on new
weapons and planes.

The Poles
carried on their work from southern France which had not been occupied by the
Germans. Beginning in September 1942 it was certain that Polish agent stations
were located in the immediate vicinity of the higher staffs of the French
armistice army.

In March
1943 German counterintelligence was able to deal the Polish organization a
serious blow but after a few weeks it revived, following a reorganization.
Beginning the summer of 1943 messages could be read. They contained military
and economic information. The Poles in southern France worked as an independent
group and received instructions from England, partly by courier, and partly by
radio. They collaborated closely with the staff of General Giraud in North
Africa and with American intelligence service in Lisbon. Official French
couriers traveling between Vichy and Lisbon were used, with or without their
knowledge, to carry reports (in the form of microfilm concealed in the covers
of books).

The Poles
had a special organization to check on German rail traffic to France. It
watched traffic at the following frontier points: Trier, Aachen, Saarbrucken,
München-Gladbach, Strassburg-Mülhausen and Belfort. They also watched the Rhine
crossings at Duisburg, Coblenz, Düsseldorf, Küln, Mannheim, Mainz,
Ludwigshafen, and Wiesbaden. Ten transmitters were used for the purpose.

All the
Polish organizations in France were directed by General Julius Kleeberg. They
worked primarily against Germany and in three fields:

1.
Espionage and intelligence;

2.
Smuggling (personnel);

3. Courier
service.

Head of
the "smuggling service" until 1.6.1944 was the celebrated Colonel
Jaklicz, followed later by Lt. Colonel Goralski. Jaklicz tried to penetrate all
Polish organizations and send all available man power via Spain to England for
service in the Polish Army.The
"courier net" in France served the "Civil Delegation", the
smuggling net, and the espionage service by forwarding reports. The function of
the Civil Sector of the "Civil Delegation" in France was to prepare
the Poles in France to fight for an independent Poland by setting up action
groups, to combat Communism among the Poles, and to fight against the occupying
Germans. The tasks of the military sector of the Delegation were to organize groups
with military training to carry on sabotage, to take part in the invasion, and
to recruit Poles for military service on "D-Day". The "Civil
Delegation" was particularly concerned with Poles in the German O.T.
(Organisation Todt) or in the armed forces. It sought to set up cells which
would encourage desertion and to supply information.

Early in
1944 this spy net shifted to Northern France and the Channel Coast. The Poles
sought to camouflage this development by sending their messages from the Grenoble
area and permitting transmitters in Northern France to send only occasional
operational chatter. The center asked primarily for reports and figures on
German troops, tanks and planes, the production of parts in France, strength at
airfields, fuel deliveries from Germany, French police, constabulary,
concentration camps and control offices, as well as rocket aircraft, rocket
bombs and unmanned aircraft.

In
February 1944 the Germans found that Polish agents were getting very important
information by tapping the army telephone cable in Avignon.

In March
1944, the Germans made a successful raid and obtained important radio and
cryptographic material. Quite a few agents were arrested and the structure of
the organization was fully revealed.

Beginning
early in June, increased activity of Polish radio agents in France became
noticeable. They covered German control points and tried to report currently
all troop movements. German counterintelligence was able to clarify the
organization, its members, and its activity, by reading some 3,000 intercepted
messages in connection with traffic analysis. With the aid of the Security
Police preparations were made for the action "Fichte" which was
carried out on 13 July 1944 and netted over 300 prisoners in all parts of France.

This,
together with preliminary and simultaneous actions, affected:

1. The
intelligence service of the Polish II Section,

2. The
smuggling service,

3. The
courier service with its wide ramifications.

The
importance of the work of the Poles in France is indicated by the fact that in
May 1944 Lubicz and two agents were commended by persons very high in the
Allied command "because their work was beginning to surpass first class
French sources." These agents had supplied the plans of all German defense
installations in French territory and valuable details regarding weapons and
special devices.

Flicke’s
statements on the solution of Polish intelligence codes in 1943 can be
confirmed, in part, by the postwar interrogation of Oscar Reile, head of Abwehr counterintelligence in occupied France.
In his report 'Notes on
Leitstelle III West Fur Frontaufklarung' (4) he said about the Polish intelligence
communications:

CODE-CRACKING
BY FUNKABWEHR

107.
Leitstelle III West also benefited from the work done by the code and cipher
department of Funkabwehr, which studied all captured documents connected with
codes and ciphers, with the object of decoding and deciphering the WT traffic
of agents who were regarded as important and could not be captured.

108.
Valuable results were often obtained by Funkabwehr. During the winter of 43/44,
the above-mentioned code and cipher department succeeded in breaking codes used
by one of the most important transmitters of the Polish Intelligence Service in
FRANCE. For months thereafter WT reports from Polish agents to ENGLAND were
intercepted and understood; the same applied to orders they received from
ENGLAND. The Germans also learnt that important military plants were known to
the Allies, and a considerable number of names and cover names of members of
the Polish Intelligence Service were discovered.

Flicke also
said ‘Early in 1944 this spy net shifted to Northern France and the Channel
Coast. The Poles sought to camouflage this development by sending their
messages from the Grenoble area and
permitting transmitters in Northern France to send only occasional operational
chatter’. This statement can also
be confirmed by other German and British reports.

The monthly reports of Referat 12 (Agents section) of the German Army’s
signal intelligence agency OKH/In 7/VI (5) mention spy messages from Grenoble
in May and July 1943 as links top and 71c (9559, Grenoble), so it
is possible that these are the Polish intelligence messages that Flicke says
were solved in summer 1943. Unfortunately these reports are difficult to
interpret since they use codewords for each spy case.

More
information is available from messages found in the captured archives of
OKW/Chi (since Chi also worked on Polish military intelligence codes). The
British report DS/24/1556 of October 1945 (6) shows that messages on the link
London-Grenoble were solved and these were enciphered with the military attaché
cipher POLDI 4.

The same
report mentions that in August 1944 the British authorities became aware that
decoded Polish military intelligence messages from Grenoble were sent from
Berlin to the Abwehr station in Madrid, Spain:

‘In August 1944, a series of decoded Polish
‘Deuxieme Bureau’ messages between London and Grenoble were seen by us in ISK
traffic being forwarded by Berlin to Abwehr authorities at Madrid. The time lags
varied between 5 and 43 days. S.L.C. Section at headquarters informed us that
this was a properly controlled leakage, and that no cypher security action was necessary
or desirable.’

Some of these
messages can be found in the British national archives (7):

It is
interesting to note that the response of the higher authorities was ‘this was a properly controlled leakage, and
that no cypher security action was necessary or desirable’, without however
giving more details.

Conclusion

During WWII
the Polish intelligence service operated throughout Europe and was able to
gather information of great value for the Western Allies. These activities were
opposed by the security services of Nazi Germany and in this shadow war many
Allied spy networks were destroyed and their operatives imprisoned or killed. In
their operations against Allied agents the Germans relied not only on their own
counterintelligence personnel but also signals intelligence and codebreaking.
Fixed and mobile stations of the Radio Defense Corps (Funkabwehr) monitored
unauthorized radio transmissions and through direction finding located their
exact whereabouts.

The Agents
section of Inspectorate 7/VI and OKW/Chi analyzed and decoded enciphered agents
messages, with the results passed to the security services Abwehr and Sicherheitsdienst.
Both agencies solved Polish intelligence communications including traffic from Switzerland,
France, Poland,
the Middle
East and other areas. The Polish intelligence networks in France were an
important target for the Germans not only because they were a security risk but
also because they would undoubtedly assist the Allied troops in their invasion
of Western Europe in 1944. In that sense the compromise of the communications
of the Polish military intelligence network was an important success since it
allowed the Germans to dismantle parts of this group and also learn of what the
Allied authorities wanted to know about German strengths and dispositions in
France.

According to
Flicke the success started in summer 1943 and from the British reports we can
see that they continued to solve the traffic till summer ’44 (when France was
liberated). It is not clear of when the Brits first learned that the Polish
communications had been compromised and what measures they took to prevent the
leakage of sensitive information. It is also not clear of whether they chose to
inform the Poles about all this…